A Little More Human
A long time ago, my husband worked with someone who introduced him to the book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. At the time it felt wild (sort of like how Tom Cruise pawing at his invisible swipe screen in Minority Report seemed ca-razy), but now a novel like A Little More Human, by Fiona Maazel (and published in 2017), doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. This book is part literary fiction and part…speculative fiction? I say the latter only because of the role of a biotech facility that develops prosthetics and other future-oriented and “efficiency”-enhancing technologies that help prolong others’ lives. In other words, in 2021, this stuff doesn’t seem too out of reach, so in a way, A Little More Human is simply souped-up literary fiction. To anyone who’s into exploring ideas of memory/memory retrieval, the interplay between our physical and spiritual/psychological beings, cognition, mind reading, or what it takes to “believe” something: Give this, Maazel’s third novel, a go. It’s not her most lauded, but it’s pretty enterprising.
The mind – and its desire to cling to a narrative – is powerful, as we see in news stories day after day. After watching the news unfold yesterday, I’d like to say that A Little More Human is a relationship-oriented story masquerading as commentary on 21st-century technology. But maybe it’s a sci-fi whodunit, but you wouldn’t know it because it’s really about a man’s quest to make amends with the people in his life. Perhaps there’s a little “4D chess” going on and Maazel is making you perform intricate mental gymnastics to figure it out. (Why do I bother reading comments on online news stories?!) As Ada, personal assistant to the founder of aforementioned facility, says, “…why cling to the idea that people are who they appear to be?” So I guess this book can be whatever you want it to be. The good news is that with fiction, that’s ok.
originally published on instagram